High-Performance Load Testing

An airhacks.fm conversation with Francesco Nigro (@forked_franz)
about: discussion about the importance of stress testing over
System Tests and unit tests, Coordinated Omission Problem in load
generators where they don't accurately measure server performance
during slowdowns, introduction to HyperFoil as a high-performance
load generator capable of generating millions of requests per
second with just two cores, explanation of how HyperFoil avoids GC
overhead by pre-allocating resources, the architecture of HyperFoil
using Netty event loops and a graph-based execution model,
comparison with other load testing tools like JMeter, K6, Apache
Benchmark and Vegeta, introduction to QDUP as a shell automation
tool for distributed testing, overview of Horreum for performance
test results storage and analysis, explanation of how these tools
work together in Red Hat's performance testing pipeline, discussion
of JCTools and its importance for GC-free concurrent data
structures, the Universal Scalability Law and its application to
load balancing algorithms, the pick-two-random algorithm for
efficient resource allocation, the benefits of using JBang for easy
one-line execution of HyperFoil, potential drawbacks of HyperFoil
including ergonomics and JIT compilation warm-up issues, the
possibility of using GraalVM native image to avoid JIT compilation
delays

Francesco Nigro on twitter: @forked_franz